Pamela Fiori reflects on the legendary Audrey Hepburn as Richard Avedon's muse. Plus, look back at more stunning pictures, here.

In glorious motion, Audrey Hepburn races past Winged Victory and down the Louvre's magnificent Daru staircase in a strapless Givenchy gown, her silk wrap billowing behind her. Like a rare and delicate bird about to take flight, with her white-gloved arms stretched overhead, she shouts, "Take the picture! Take the picture!" Freeze frame, et voilà! This iconic fashion-muse-meets-movie moment is captured in Funny Face, the 1957 musical based loosely on photographer Richard Avedon's early career. For 20 years, Avedon was the principal fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar under its wildly eccentric fashion editor, Diana Vreeland. In the film, the magazine is Quality, a thinly veiled Bazaar; the photographer's name is Dick Avery; and the young model who inspires him is played by Hepburn, who was Avedon's real-life muse. Art imitates life.

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Funny Face was released when Avedon, arguably the greatest fashion photographer of his generation, was approaching the pinnacle of his career. Professionally, he cultivated several women, including Suzy Parker, her sister Dorian Leigh, and Dovima, but it was Hepburn who most inspired him. Waif-thin, she stood five feet seven inches tall and was blessed with high cheekbones and doelike eyes. Add to this a lilting voice with an aristocratic accent, a radiant smile, and a sense of style second to none, and she was impossible to resist. It has been 20 years now since the actress's death, in January 1993, at her home in Switzerland, but the handful of covers and stories she worked on with Vreeland and Avedon remain among the most charming in the magazine's history.

Hepburn's association with the photographer was similar to the one she shared with Hubert de Givenchy, according to Robert Wolders, Hepburn's companion in the last years of her life. "Audrey trusted Dick completely," he says. "And once she trusted someone, she'd do anything. She often said that working with him was like having a conversation with a good friend." For Avedon's first Hepburn cover for Bazaar, in April 1956 (a year before Funny Face was released), she is peeking from beneath a floral-print scarf and a straw hat, as fresh as a flower. A few months later, they teamed up again for the cover, this time with Hepburn in dramatic red lips and zebra stripes. Inside, the actress (who was then starring in War and Peace alongside her husband, Mel Ferrer) was a vision in feathers, so many of them that all you could see were her wide eyes and beaming smile.

Other collaborations followed, but the ultimate Avedon-Hepburn partnership for Bazaar appeared in the September 1959 issue. The 20-page portfolio that Avedon "directed" was more like a scripted film than a fashion story. Shot primarily in Paris, it starred Hepburn, Ferrer, Buster Keaton, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and a white cat named Simone. The opener was all type; the title, "Paris Pursuit." Outfits came from 13 French houses, including Chanel, Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Jean Patou, Madame Grès, and Nina Ricci. (Oddly, nothing was from Givenchy.) Starting at the Gare du Nord, the plot moved to the Ritz, the streets of Paris, Maxim's restaurant, and the Eiffel Tower before ending high in the Italian Alps.

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The last Harper's Bazaar story with Hepburn came 22 years later, in September 1981, photographed not by Avedon but by Jacques Malignon. Elizabeth Taylor graced the cover, and Hepburn was one of 11 women over 40 (and "Sensational!" a headline proclaimed). She wore Givenchy and, while more mature, was no less beautiful or glowing.

Hepburn's son Sean Hepburn Ferrer says that growing up in the Swiss village of Tolochenaz in the '60s, he had no idea of his mother's fame. She stopped making films for a period, and except for catching the occasional glimpse of her in a movie on their small black-and-white two-channel television, Sean says, he never saw his mother as the actress Audrey Hepburn. "It wasn't until I was 14," he says, "that I finally saw her films. We found an old 16-millimeter projector in the attic, put up a bedsheet—I ironed it myself—and watched reels that were given to her by Paramount. In those days, stars weren't given fancy DVD players and DVDs after a film wrapped; they got a 16-millimeter copy. But it was fantastic to see those movies with the wonderful sound of the old projector in the background. That was when I first saw Funny Face. I remember being mesmerized by Love in the Afternoon, with Gary Cooper. As a big Ernst Lubitsch fan, I felt that particular movie [directed by Billy Wilder] was the most 'Lubitschian' to me in its urbanity. I also was deeply touched by The Nun's Story because it was the first time I saw my mother in something other than a romantic comedy."

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Hepburn's younger son, Luca Dotti, was born in 1970 during the actress's marriage to the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. Like Sean, Luca never regarded her as a movie star: "Until her last day and for all her life at home with us, she was never 'Audrey Hepburn,' just 'Mama.' For most people, their mother is just their mother, and questions never arise. For us, it was just like that. Only later did we find out about all the love and admiration her life and career had been able to inspire."

When the Dottis lived in Rome, the family kept pretty much to themselves. If Hepburn took the boys for a stroll, they were often hounded by paparazzi. Sometimes it was too much. "In a way she was relieved that Hollywood was part of her past," says Luca, whose book about his mother, Audrey in Rome, will be published in the spring. (It contains almost 200 photographs, many never previously published, of the actress both on and off film sets in the city.) "Being a full-time mother was the career I knew her for. Having a family was the center of her real 'success' after the frenzy of her career."

"I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera."

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Hepburn may have looked as if she never ate a morsel, but the reality was quite the opposite. "Food was always important, as it was the reason to sit together and listen to our stories," Luca recalls. "She just loved that—to listen, as if her own life wasn't such a big deal. Cooking and sharing recipes with friends were part of the victory of being able to lead a private life."

And though the actress was born in Brussels and raised in the Netherlands, her appetite was distinctly Italian. "Mum had three favorite dishes: pasta, pasta, and pasta," he says. "She couldn't have enough of a simple spaghetti al pomodoro, so much so that friends were always amazed at just how much she could eat. At restaurants she often begged for her favorite dish, as if she were asking a great favor. And she sometimes traveled with what she called her 'lifesaving kit': a few boxes of spaghetti, olive oil, and Parmesan. We used to grow our own tomatoes in Switzerland, and before the season was over, she deep-froze them whole. Our cook still recalls how much the combination of tomato and basil reminded her of the smell of summer and made her, and all of us, very happy."

In the late 1970s, Italy was terrorized by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), a radical group notorious for assassinations and kidnappings of prominent people and their children. After the group's failed attempt to seize Sean and Luca, Hepburn dispatched Sean to the safety of a Swiss boarding school while she and Luca remained in Rome with Dotti. During this time the couple's marriage became increasingly strained, and in 1980 they formally separated.

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Early that year, Hepburn made a trip to Beverly Hills to see her closest friend, Connie Wald, the widow of the movie producer Jerry Wald. It was there that she became acquainted with Robert Wolders, a Dutch-born actor. His wife, the actress Merle Oberon, had died a couple of months before, and he was in no mood to see anyone, much less meet someone new. "I was in an unhappy period and was content to do nothing more than walk on the beach," he says. Connie called and asked him to come over for dinner, saying it would be "just family." "I assumed that meant Connie and her two sons," Wolders recalls. "I didn't realize she'd invited William Wyler and Billy Wilder [both of whom directed Hepburn in movies] and, to my surprise, Audrey.

"We'd met a few times before on social occasions but never to talk," he says. "Knowing I came from Holland, she spoke to me in Dutch—the most palatable Dutch I'd ever heard. We made a connection that night, but I thought it was just that. And I certainly didn't realize she was in an unhappy marriage."

That spring, Wolders was headed to New York for an auction of Oberon's jewelry at Christie's. Wald told him that Hepburn, who was shooting the Peter Bogdanovich film They All Laughed, would be there too, staying at the Pierre, and urged him to call. "I didn't," he admits, "because I thought it would be intrusive." However, the day before he was to return to California, Wald telephoned and insisted that he contact Hepburn. "When I did, she answered the phone and said, 'Hello, Robbie.' That touched me very deeply because the only people who called me Robbie were my family. I asked her if she'd like to have a drink, although I had promised friends I'd meet them at a party. She suggested the café at the Pierre. Three hours later, we were still there. Obviously, I missed the party.

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"She asked if I'd mind if she had a small bite to eat, whereupon she ordered a huge plate of pasta," Wolders continues. "Maybe I kissed her on the cheek at the end of the evening, I don't even remember." He called her three days later, and for the next four months they spoke almost daily. The pair then began traveling back and forth between Europe and the States to see each other. "Finally, in 1985, I moved to Switzerland to be with her."

Although Hepburn and Dotti divorced in 1982, she and Wolders never married; they didn't feel as if they had to. With Wolders she spent some of the most contented days of her life, peacefully tending to her garden in Switzerland. She might have stayed there had she not found yet another calling. In 1988, she applied to become an International Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. As she explained in her application, she had never forgotten the deprivations of wartime that she and her family had suffered in Holland after the German invasion and she remembered clearly the relief provided by the Red Cross and UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, a forerunner of UNICEF). It was a position that suited her maternal instincts perfectly. "This is for me an immense privilege and an answer to my longing to help children in whatever small way I can," she wrote.

Over the next four years, Hepburn, accompanied by Wolders, traveled to remote corners of Asia, Central and South America, and Africa, meeting victims of famine, disease, and war. For these trips she wore a uniform of jeans and Lacoste shirts, no makeup and her hair pulled back. "Her career can be split into two chapters," her friend Leslie Caron wrote in 1993. "In the first part she received all the glory she could hope for, and in the second part she gave back, in spades, what she had received."

Before her death from colon cancer in 1993, Hepburn had taken on very few films and shied away from Hollywood events. But in January 1989, she appeared in New York to present her dear friend Richard Avedon with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. "For Richard," she told the audience, "I've happily swung through swings, stood in clouds of steam, been drenched with rain, and descended endless flights of stairs without looking and without breaking my neck.... Only with Richard have I been able to shed my innate self-consciousness in front of the camera. Is it his sweetness? Is it his sense of fun? The assurance that you know you're going to end up looking the way you wished you looked?"

Avedon later paid the compliment in return. "I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera.... I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record, I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she was....She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait."

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